Product description

Redis, Neo4J, Couch, Mongo, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB-both JavaScript powered, document oriented datastores-are strikingly different. Learn about the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak and Cassandra. Understand MapReduce and how to use it to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will give you a broad understanding of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.
What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.

Author information

Eric Redmond has been involved the software industry and open source worlds for over a decade, working as lead engineer/DBA with Fortune 500 companies, governments and startups. He was a contributor to two Java books and considerably more articles, and is a popular speaker and active organizer/occupant of several technology groups. He currently resides in Portland with wife Noelle, toys with inviite.com and makes things out of glass. Jim R. Wilson started hacking at the age of 13 and never looked back. He has worked as an engineer and web guru at companies in the healthcare, search and marketing sectors. He began tinkering with Non-SQL databases in 2007, and has contributed code to large-scale open source projects like MediaWiki and HBase. A frequent speaker at local JavaScript and NoSQL events, he lives in Littleton, MA with his incredible wife Ruth, and two amazing children.

Review quote

""The flow is perfect. On Friday, you'll be up and running with a new database. On Saturday, you'll see what it's like under daily use. By Sunday, you'll have learned a few tricks that might even surprise the experts! And next week, you'll vault to another database and have fun all over again."" --Ian Dees Coauthor, "Using JRuby"""Provides a great overview of several key databases that will multiply your data modeling options and skills. Read if you want database envy seven times in a row."" --Sean Copenhaver, Lead Code Commodore backgroundchecks.com""This is by far the best substantive overview of modern databases. Unlike the host of tutorials, blog posts, and documentation I have read, this book taught me why I would want to use each type of database and the ways in which I can use them in a way that made me easily understand and retain the information. It was a pleasure to read."" --Loren Sands-Ramshaw, Software Engineer U.S. Department of Defense